Meet The Pitch 2017 finalists

Active Monthly

Staying motivated with fitness throughout the year can be a real challenge, with brits wasting over 500 million every year on unused gym memberships, staying consistently active is a challenge. I’m George, founder of Active Monthly – the monthly subscription box here to inspire you along your fitness journey. Every month you will be introduced to the highest quality and innovative brands in the health and fitness world. From healthy snacking superfoods to body care and even gym passes.

We strive on reminding you why you started becoming fit – on the days you forget. In a £4billion industry, our subscribers are busy, young professionals that know the benefits of staying active, yet struggle with time, affordability and knowledge. Since starting Active Monthly I have overcome challenges I did not know I could, from the diagnosis of type1 diabetes to pitching with confidence. Perseverance is a core value of mine – I am opportunity hungry and The Pitch sounds like a fantastic challenge.

Beelinguapp

Beelinguapp is a language learning software that functions as a Karaoke Audiobook, it shows the text being played in two different languages side by side.
It plays audio reading the text and shows a karaoke animation on both sides. Users read along in the language they are learning, while having the text in their native language as a reference.

The voices and translations are from real people. It has a large collection of texts including fairy tales, novels, news, Wikipedia entries etc… in all difficulty levels translated and narrated to (so far) 13 languages.

– It is already profitable
– It has more than 250,000 users
– It has an “Editors Choice” Badge awarded by Google Play.
– 4.7 stars rating in the Google Play Store
– Was featured in an article naming the 5 best language learning apps in the editors choice section of Google Play

Tilkee

60% of sales proposals sent are never followed up on by the sender & salespeople waste over 30 minutes every day following up with uninterested prospects. Tilkee is the answer to these everyday problems.

Tilkee is a tool which tracks exactly who, how, when and for how long your sent proposals, quotes, marketing material or other documents are read. You are informed in real-time alerts with detailed insights including time spent on each page. Since Tilkee removes the random & adds intelligence to your sales and marketing processes, you can now contact the right prospect, at the right time, with the right arguments to increase conversion rate, optimise prospect follow-up and boost lead transformation.

Tilkee is used by EDF, Orange, Adecco, Veolia & TNT in France and elsewhere and it’s the only worldwide solution to be integrated into such a wide range of CRMs, email tools, CPQ and marketing automation tools.

In 5 years Tilkee will have revolutionised B2B marketing & sales.

EatFirst

My name is Rahul Parekh. I am CEO of EatFirst, the UK’s first premium online restaurant.
Working long hours in the City made it really hard to eat well and I was always frustrated with the poor experience of takeaway food. It was always either lukewarm, overcooked or poorly presented. I launched EatFirst as a food-tech business with a mission to create innovative food experiences that were designed specifically for delivery.

Our solution was radical: create delicious and healthy meals, prepared by top chefs and make them available for order on a simple online platform. The meals would be designed for delivery; chilled and in beautiful packaging, revolutionising the dining-in experience. In short, we wanted to re-invest the weeknight dinner and make it easy for everyone to eat well.

We’ve sold over 300,0000 meals to date and have created a fantastic food brand, purely online. I believe my team should win The Pitch simply because they are the best talent in food AND technology.
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Glitzbox

Glitzbox is the UK’s first jewellery rental subscription service. Think Birchbox meets Netflix for quality jewellery discovery. Subscribers sign up from just £39/month and fill out a style quiz. We then select three pieces based on their preferences from our exciting, independent designers. They have the luxury of wearing these pieces (worth over £200), at the end of each month they can return all their pieces ready for their next box or buy any of the pieces they can’t bear to part with!

From a designer perspective we are bridging the gap between selling online and offline, providing a platform for them to be noticed by targeted customers. For our members we are revolutionising the way they buy and discover jewellery. Giving them the luxury of refreshing their jewellery regularily for a fraction of the retail price. Buying less but buying better!

HANX

The first male condom designed uniquely with women in mind, HANX allows women to take control of their sexual health and feel empowered to do so. Here at HANX, we felt that buying condoms was not only difficult for us as women, but also taboo and embarrassing. It is our mission to change this. In a place where sexuality is freely expressed and where access to sexual health services is ever improving, this felt archaic and wrong. Thus, HANX was formed. Our brand promotes female empowerment and makes it the norm for women, as well as men, to carry condoms. The male condom is the single most effective contraceptive that protects against sexually transmitted infections. We should feel comfortable buying, carrying and using them, and ultimately proud to take care of our sexual health. HANX is a lifestyle brand, which is changing behaviours, encouraging women to take control and ultimately creating a movement. We are disrupting the male-targeted industry as we know it.

KOMPAS

KOMPAS is a mobile travel application, using artificial intelligence to learn about habits, interests, and availability, before presenting users with unique, personal and relevant locations. We’re bringing city exploration into the 21st century by creating personalised experiences.

We’re active in 4 cities and have been featured in national and international press. We’ve represented the UK in three startup world finals, and have placed top 5 every time. We recently completed the LM Labs accelerator and won the overall cohort award, securing a commercial partnership with London Midland. We also won the Visa Everywhere Initiative and a commercial partnership with Visa. All 4 of our co-founders were named in the top 20 entrepreneurs to watch 2017 by startups.co.uk. The market we are operating in is growing quickly, with people spending £8.3bn on leisure a month in the UK alone. We believe that we should win, not just for the technology that we’re building, but also due to our growth rate.

Mak Tok

Mak Tok, which stands for “grandmother”, is a brand that is stemmed from the feeling of homesickness and appreciation. Based on a recipe I nicked from my mum, I created a chilli paste that is versatile, delicious, and irresistible. Mak Tok’s customers are mainly foodies between the age of 16-55 from the ABC category who are constantly in the search for something interesting in the culinary world. Our customers appreciate the innovative properties of the product, and here are the 5 main points of why our customers (and YOU) love the product:

1. Super versatile
2. Saves time
3. Deliciously creative
4. Simply affordable
5. Complex exotic flavours

Personally, me and Mak Tok have already won just by applying for The Pitch. Winning, to me, is about improving and being better than I was yesterday. I built Mak Tok with a goal – that is to share my story through my product and by you reading this, I’ve accomplished a tiny part of the goal. Is that a smile I virtually see on your face? 🙂

No Agent

No Agent is freeing landlords and tenants from the high costs and headaches caused by traditional lettings agents. We are taking on one of the most change-resistant industries in the UK.

Commonly, a landlord looking to manage their rental property will either self-manage, spending a lot of time and effort, or hire a letting agent that charges huge amounts from both landlord and tenant, often for a subpar job.

Our easy-to-use property management platform combines smart technology with a team of dedicated property professionals to automate the marketing, administration and maintenance of rental properties. Landlords pay one low monthly fee for the entire process and save on average 1 month’s rent per year for each property. Tenants never pay a thing.

Our customers choose how much they want to control themselves and how much they want to pass on to us, and have complete real-time visibility over their property’s status. Best of all, our team is there 24/7 to pick up queries or issues.

OneUp Sales

Despite being one of the oldest professions in the world, sales hasn’t aged well; performance is difficult to visualise, incentives are time-consuming to manage and coaching staff is almost impossible with all the other work managers are required to carry out.

Here at OneUp Sales we’re bringing sales into the modern world. Our cloud-based solution helps sales leaders boost motivation and productivity through a gamified performance management featureset. By utilising data from their existing systems, automated competitions and digital wallboard technology enables companies to visualise performance on highly customisable TV displays whilst automated competitions remove all the legwork required to motivate their teams.

With companies such as Pertemps and Totaljobs signing up to the platform it’s clear that it has cross-market appeal. Having received £150,000 investment we’re determined to demonstrate the performance improvements OneUp can deliver.

Quander

The communication between brand and consumer is broken. Modern communication tools do not work. We have tried to fix this with Experiential Marketing by giving customers a face for the brand to relate to and the product to engage with, but we do not know what end to end affect that has on the bottom line.

Our platform Quander, allows brands to track customers across multiple disciplines, whether it’s Experiential, Out of Home, Web, Mobile or eCommerce to measure the impact of interaction. How many times do we have to touch a customer to turn them into a brand advocate? Can we incentivise participation through competitions and rewards? If we add a cost effective photo or video activation as part of a sampling exercise, will I deliver more value for my customer? Our platform helps advertising, marketing and experiential professionals answer those questions by not just giving them analytics, but the easy, cost effective tools to collect the data they need in the first place.

Rockit

Rockit is a compact and portable baby rocker that fits to any pushchair or pram. It gently rocks to soothe your baby to sleep or keep them asleep. Tired parents up and down the country are seen bouncing, swaying and rocking to calm their babies and now the Rockit will gently do that for them.

We have spent two years developing Rockit and have had support from the Design Council after winning their Spark accelerator programme in 2016. Rockit is a unique product and was one of two finalists in the Baby Products Association Innovation Awards 2016. It is currently being manufactured and we have an order for our first 5000 units from a highly respected pushchair manufacturer and distributor. Mothercare, Babies R Us and John Lewis have expressed interest in stocking the Rockit and it was featured by ‘Which?’ as “The number one baby product to look out for!”

We’d love to win The Pitch and keep this momentum going, enabling us to turn a great product in to a great business.

TicketChain

TicketChain is a paperless ticketing platform that allows artists and promoters to control their own primary and secondary ticket markets. This approach, which is enabled by a technology called blockchain, allows the artist/promoter to control how tickets are transferred between individuals. What this means is that we can guarantee that tickets are valid, are only resold at face value and that the artist/promoter is able to charge a fee every time a ticket is resold thus allowing them to capture a share of the secondary market. This addresses two of the main issues plaguing the industry: touting and fraud.

TicketChain will work with the artists and promoters to issue tickets in this way but will drive revenue primarily from the fans in the form of booking fees. With card transactions having recently overtaken cash in the UK, the trend toward digital tickets is undeniable and TicketChain will be perfectly poised to enable that transition.

Vanuse

Vanuse is a on-demand “transportation as a service” platform.

Our hassle free mobile app and website, enables businesses and individuals to instantly connect to available van and driver services in their local area.
Our customers can request a pick up instantly, or schedule a future pick up and a driver will accept the job and be on their way!